Since September 22nd, “Kiss The Ground – The Movie” can be watched on Netflix. In short, the movie explains the role of carbon cycles in nature, and highlights the importance of rebuilding soils across the globe as a key solution how civilizations can address climate change. The movie cautiously balances the many trenches that are currently tearing North America apart: it uses language that both conservative and progressive people understand in its choice of words and regional dialects; the movie emphasizes our need to draw down carbon from the atmosphere and re-invigorate terrestrial water cycles through land use change, while also stressing the necessity to simultaneously cut ourselves off fossil fuel consumption; it portrays meat consumption in a nuanced manner that condemns some production systems while explaining the benefits of others (“It’s not the cow, it’s the how”). The movie is designed to raise awareness that regenerating soils can bridge the abyss between Conservatives and Democrats in the US and offers the opportunity to re-learn collaboration. The movies is made such that US farmers can watch it with their critical children and grand children without triggering immediate emotional responses by laying blame.
A stark reality that the movie leaves as an aside: most land is owned by white people, managed by white males. Most of these white males are deeply conservative, even libertarian. Somewhat paradoxically, these farmers are against any form of government while depending on it… My favorite line is a half sentence by a key protagonist: Farmer Gabe Brown mentions that with regenerative practices, he could finally cut himself off social welfare by government because he financially no longer relies on agricultural subsidies. In a room full of white libertarians this hits a nerve. The movie does, however, directly attack industrial farming by drawing a historic line between Fritz Haber, the German who is considered the father of chemical warfare and postulated the “kill formula” for chemical weapons that is still utilized, who also gave birth to industrial agriculture by developing synthetic nitrate fertilizer and pesticides.
Recently, the movie was criticized for elevating white farmers as potential saviors of the planet while not appreciating colonial injustice and traditional systems. Within the Christian grammar of “saving others to save your own soul”, these white farmers travel to convert other land owners into regenerative practices. This way, the movie continues colonial attitudes and the grammar of racism – without acknowledging the real history of the US West: White ownership of land builds on genocide, biological warfare when white military intentionally spread plague among native Americans, and the biggest ecocide of the planet when white newcomers annihilated the herds of ~40 Million bison that roamed the Great Plains. The movie does not acknowledge the unfair distribution of land between races, economic classes and gender; the movie ignores many systemic trenches that lock our world into our destructive food system.
I am a privileged white male myself – full disclosure. I traveled the world in my 20s, acquired free education in Germany, and we now own an ecological farm that we purchased with support of my and my wife’s parents. With today’s land prices, it is impossible to carry a land mortgage with farming – a sad reality of our times, and I am thankful that our parents enabled us to farm ecologically. Yet, I am not ashamed of our privilege – I rather see it as a responsibility that was given to me at birth. Our privilege frees us from some of today’s suffering, but it does not save us from the task of finding meaning! For us, privilege mostly means responsibility – privilege opens up spaces for experimenting with life in ways that remain inaccessible to others, and it is our task in life to use our privilege for good! Much social innovation has come from people with privileges – the first black president of the US came from a relatively privileged family, and so did Martin Luther King. So when the KTG movie portrayed a white woman bringing composting toilets to Haiti, to “bring the poop back into the loop” of nutrient cycles, my first response was that (1) poop is a tremendously important element of the global nutrient cycle and I applauded the producers for daring to mentioning such a yucky topic; (2) in Western societies we are simply too rich and privileged to even consider the poop issue, and that (3) poor countries in distress open opportunities for solutions that humans ultimately need to bring to all parts of the globe, including our privileged world. Did I mention that we just built three composting toilets for our farm and struggle with how it is perceived? I understand that this scene is colonial at heart in the way it shows white women with black children – but at the same time, it also flips the current worldview upside down: societal transformation is being enacted in the Global South, while the West is stuck in its privileges, unable to acquire technologies that build on distributed knowledge (such as agroecology, de-central composting, or safely “bringing the poop back into the loop”). Here in the West, we prefer technologies that build on centralized knowledge – knowledge in the hands of few experts and investors who appropriated patents to it!
In a way, the movie can be criticized by all sides – for not being bolt and radical enough, and for being too radical for the mainstream. In difficult times, this seems to be a historic theme as old as Western history: Jesus Christ was attacked by supporters of the Roman imperialist system for being a revolutionary, while radical Palestines equally attacked his moderate non-violence. In a way, Jesus was crucified because both Roman collaborators and nationalist radicals hated Jesus’ message of altruistic love – more than the two groups hated each other! Yet, his message of bridging and moderation also inspired and in a way is shaping our planet’s societies until today. For many years, nonpartisan politicians believed “you got the right balance when you are attacked from all sides”. I don’t want to equate this movie to the alike of Jesus, but I would like to raise caution before condemning the movie entirely.
Yes, land ownership and political power has never been as skewed as it is now. Equity is probably the biggest societal challenge of the early 21th century that undermines humankind’s ability to address humankind’s survival. And equity is directly convoluted with the destructive forces of capitalism, the shallowness of disengaged consumerism, and the meaning crisis of those who have succumbed their lives to its privileged convenience. For many years now, I am stating that the healing of the food system will probably start with a land reform. Just to be clear: Land reform means that land is taken away from those who currently own it, and shared with others who do not own land now. Historically, land reforms almost always happen after violent wars. One of the few exceptions was Salvador Allende’s land reform in Chile – which the forces of the day (especially the US!) considered of such danger that they had Allende and his entire government assassinated. Inequality of land ownership has been a driving force behind civil war and genocide. Kiss The Ground has not called for a deep land reform and a reinvention of market forces in agriculture, which I believe are both necessary condition for the regenerative revolution that the world needs. Yet, the post movie discussion will inevitably lead to this topic!
I am not sure if those people who are advocating for “land equity” are fully aware for the implications of this demand. The call for land reform has often driven civil wars, and I see no indication why the US could reform its land ownership without being drawn into violent conflict. Rural libertarians are probably the best-armed political fraction in the US, with millions of assault rifles, grenades, and defensive gears. Meanwhile, land ownership is quickly slipping out of the hand of aging white male rural libertarians whos economic survival – as Gabe Brown pointed out – is entirely dependent on government welfare programs, in the form of subsidies for corn and soy. Within only a few years, most land will be owned by a handful of investment funds – North America is rapidly returning to a situation of “landless peasants that pay to over-powerful aristocrats”, which the ancestors of our White farmers have escaped from when immigrating from Europe.
I personally have come to accept that land will return into the hands of the super rich within the next decade or two. I believe that, once rural white libertarians have passed their land over to these institutional investors as their retirement gift to society, history may open opportunities for a more peaceful expropriation of much fewer land owners – while avoiding to slip into a decade of hot civil war. I seldomly talk about these future scenarios, less so with North Americans – I doubt that people are ready for this discussion yet. I fear that, after not having a hot war on North American soil for more than 150 years, the full depth of ‘calling for land reform’ escapes even those looking back on a history of oppression and slavery.
I do not blame the makers of Kiss The Ground for dodging the discussion of equity, which inevitably will lead to a call for land reform and expropriation. I would rather like to see the rebirth of fifty million victory gardens in backyards, hundreds of thousands of intensive market gardens, and large stretches of Savanna land grazed regeneratively. With this dispersed knowledge, our societies may be able to dodge civil wars – and for that, we have to get one message out, famously written by the 13th century Persian poet Rumi: “Let the beauty you love be what you do, there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” I am certainly with Finian and the KTG team on that!
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